British Science Festival: Shedding light on baby brain injury

Anna Paul

Written by Alan Barker, Freelance Writer, British Science Festival

Detecting brain damage in newborns is notoriously difficult. Gemma Bale of UCL is helping to develop an innovative method for investigating brain activity – using infrared light. Alan Barker followed her into an area of research that promises to give new hope to babies and their families.

Think of engineering and you might think of the mighty achievements of Isambard Kingdom Brunel: railways, bridges, ships and tunnels. Gemma Bale of UCL, however, who gave the Brunel Award Lecture at this year’s British Science Festival, is taking engineering into a very different environment: the intensive care unit.

In every 2000 newborn babies, three will be born with some kind of brain injury. Doctors desperately need a way to monitor the metabolism in their brains: the complex cellular chemical reactions that create energy to fuel body functions. At the moment, the only way to do that is by using an MRI scan, but these babies are simply too ill to go into a scanner for at least a week. Instead, they’re treated with cooling therapy: the body temperature is reduced to 33.5 degrees, which slows metabolism down. The treatment reduces the risk of death or disability, but hypothermia is pretty extreme, and the success rate isn’t great.

Enter CYRIL (CYtochrome-c-oxidase Research Instrument and appLication). CYRIL exploits a basic fact of life: our bodies are see-through. Different substances reflect different wavelengths: take your phone torch and shine it through your finger, you’ll see that red light will pass easily through flesh, and, more importantly, bone. That means we can shine infrared through the skull and see what’s going on in the brain. CYRIL uses an old-fashioned halogen lightbulb at one end – filtered to emit very low-powered infrared light – and a spectroscope at the other, to analyse what’s reflected back, particularly from the bloodstream. Blood itself becomes less red as it becomes deoxygenated.

CYRIL’s USP is that is can also measure changes in brain metabolism in the same way. Cytochrome-c-oxidase is an enzyme that changes colour as it contributes to metabolism, so its activity can be used as a marker for metabolism as a whole. CYRIL translates that change in colour into a screen trace indicating metabolic rate in exactly the same way that monitors display heart rate or blood pressure. The device is completely non-invasive and extremely safe.

Gemma demonstrated the tech using a wired-up volunteer doing mental maths while her brain was scanned. The results were dramatic: we could see Jess’s brain working as she calculated.

The red line shows levels of oxygenated blood, the blue line levels of deoxygated blood, and the green line metabolic rate.

CYRIL allows doctors to identify newborns at particular risk of long-term injury. The way that the brain’s metabolism functions in babies with more severe injuries – babies at risk of death or cerebral palsy – is really different to that of less severely injured babies. In addition, CYRIL can help doctors understand the effect of brain seizures, which precipitate sudden leaps in metabolic rate.

And the tech might well have applications beyond neonatal care.

As she brought her lecture to a close, Gemma showed us a still from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie, a group of scientists are put into deep-cooled in cryogenic pods to carry them to Jupiter. Each pod has a monitor, displaying their vital signs. And there it is: a trace marked ‘METABOLIC LEVELS’. In 1968, that tech was pure scifi: no such monitor was available. CYRIL – along with Gemma and her team at UCL – are making it a reality. That’s cool.

The British Science Association (BSA) has today launched a new challenge in partnership with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, asking young people to come up with innovative solutions to some of society’s biggest issues.

The British Science Association (BSA) has today launched a new challenge in partnership with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, asking young people to come up with innovative solutions to some of society’s biggest issues.

This British Science Week, our citizen science partnership will focus on a great British favourite: the weather. We need your help to digitise two decades of important historical weather data, so we can contribute to new research into climate change.

Can we ever understand love? Laura Mucha wants to find out. She has interviewed hundreds of strangers, from the ages of 8 to 95 in more than 40 countries, asking them to share their most personal stories, feelings and insights about love. Here are her findings.

We're delighted to announce that Gisela Abbam has been appointed as our new Chair of Council – the group that constitutes our board of trustees - taking the reins from Lord David Willetts, who stepped down in December

With the 2019 UCAS deadline in sight, how can you make your application stand out from the crowd? We spoke to Outreach School Visits Programme Manager at Imperial, Jane Marshall, who offered some insight.

In 2018, Dr Oli Williams was awarded the Margaret Mead Award Lecture for Social Sciences. His lecture, ‘The Weight of Expectation’, challenged some of society's fundamental - and unhelpful - assumptions about obesity. Here, he reflects on his time as an Award Lecturer.

British Science Week (BSW) is a ten-day celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths - featuring fascinating, entertaining and engaging events and activities across the UK for people of all ages.